As some of you might know, I have been connected to Royal Holloway for a few good years now. I moved here from Romania to pursue an MA in Theatre Directing and since then I have worked as a member of staff in various capacities across Royal Holloway’s professional services departments.
The unique location of the Royal Holloway - on the edge of London’s M25 - combined with the history of the college, has been a constant source of fascination for me over the years. I am interested with the campus, its traditions, and the people that travel from all over the world to study and work here.
While my main artistic focus was and continues to be theatre directing, 3 years ago I picked up photography as a creative endeavour. It did not take me long to realise that compared to theatre directing work, where projects take a lot of time, energy and patience to come to fruition, photography is a much more immediate medium. You can see something happening in front of your eyes and immortalise that moment in a matter of a few seconds. It is a medium that makes you more aware of your surroundings and what's happening; your mind ends up seeing potential subjects everywhere you go.
As you can imagine, the Royal Holloway campus featured a lot in my photography from the very beginning. From pretty pictures of our campus to black and white architectural photos. Over the past three years, I have captured our campus throughout all its seasonal splendour, light and colours. I never get tired of photographing it.
In spring 2023, it occurred to me that, by focusing solely on landscape and architecture at Royal Holloway, I was missing the most important part of the university: its people. I also felt that I needed a photography project with a different aim, that would take me out of my comfort zone and challenge me to expand my photography into a different sphere. In June 2023, I started RHUL PEOPLE - a photography project focused exclusively on portraits of students, staff and alumni. I wanted to capture the diversity of the people who study and work at Royal Holloway and demonstrate the transitory nature of student experience. Whether for 3 years or 5 or 7 or even longer, at some point most of us will move on. But deep down we will all remain connected to this special place and retain some memories of it
My aim was to capture something from that fleeting moment in each person's life. I wanted people to be able to go through some of their photos, maybe many years later, and come across these portraits that I took of them. A brief moment capturing the way someone else saw them at that stage of their life. It is still unclear where this photo project will take me, but I made a commitment to myself to do it in the first phase for one whole year and reflect afterwards about its future.
Sadly, I can only share a very tiny fraction of the portraits I have taken so far, but if you would like to see a more extensive selection of this work, please visit my photography website: alexistudor.myportfolio.com. I also post frequently on my Instagram page: @istudor.alexandru. Feel free to connect with me there. Who knows, I might even ask you to take your portrait at some point.
